Chapter 52, near Huesca, 28 September 1936
The Englishman would never be called handsome, or impressive. He stretched his gangly frame, absent-mindedly rubbing his bald pate to see if it was peely or sore. It wasn’t, but just in case, he slapped on an ill-shapen forage cap.
Snatching his pipe he fastiduously (which was odd, as he was rather scruffy) checked that it had sufficient tobacco, lit it, jumped onto his feet, and walked through the lines.
Amateurs, he thought sourly, caustically.
They’re bloody amateurs. We’re bloody amateurs. He passed the village square.
“Mr Wintringham!” That was one of the Mexican leftwingers, and in his thick accent it inevitably sounded like ‘Meester Weetyham’. They were a shambles, of course, this heterogenous group taking an early morning soup from a small truck; the soup, Wintringham was confident, was their first food in days. ‘Meester Weetyham’ waved a languid hand in acknowledgment and kept on walking.
“Wintringham,” Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, a doctor formerly of St Bart’s Hospital and the man with whom Wintringham had travelled to this ragtag little army in its romantic struggle, greeted with a muted, anglo-saxon nod. He was joined by a small group of four other Britons. Mercifully, they had tea on the boil, and Sinclair-Loutit offered Wintringham a battered old British Army tin mug. It made him think of England.
“Any news overnight?” Wintringham asked this with a grimace. The Republican sense of discipline had been embryonic and among a range of activities that were not ‘obligatorio’ but were seen as voluntary were standing duties overnight, pickets and patrols, and seemingly any form of training. The British, French and German volunteers, particularly those with military experience, had been the only ones willing to assume such duties and last night’s six hours of sleep had been Wintringham’s first proper rest in five days. He had taken it guiltily, expecting all the time to wake up in Nationalist custody.
“There are confirmed reports from our French friends that the Prime Minister has resigned,” Rupert Cornford, a tall, donnish left wing poet said with a raised eyebrow. He had returned late last night from a recruiting trip to France where, seemingly, the gossip was better. “This nonsense with His Majesty has led Baldwin to step down.” Wintringham saw Sinclair-Loutit smile slyly; for all Cornford’s leftwing pretensions, he was still an establishment figure (he was Charles Darwin’ great grandson) and was carefully deferential, as if the far away King of England could hear him.
All of them though of home. “Who is the new PM?” That was a quiet middle class lad from the shires, who was here for adventure, nothing more, nothing less.
“Lloyd George,” Cornford said with a languid air of disapproval. “The Welsh adventurer is back. From the French newspapers it appears that he has taken the Liberals, some Tories, and a coupe of socialists with him!”
“Where are the enemy lines,” Wintringham began, focused upon their immediate surroundings, “any closer?”
“Didn’t you hear him Tom?” That was Ritter, an East End Londoner who had served in the Royal Artillery in the Great War. He was incredulous. “The King has forced the Government to step down!”
Wintringham sighed. “Yes, I heard, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” He fidgeted awkwardly. “At least not here.”
Sinclair-Loutit frowned. “There have been rumours for days,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you think we’ll see many of our chaps head home?”
Cornford, whose status in the opaque Republican rank structure afforded him substantial autonomy, spoke up with an authoritative air. “The supply of British volunteers has dried up somewhat, but the bigger problem is the likelihood of desertions here.”
“Is it?” Ritter asked, incredulous. He was the social outsider of this group, a man with a gritty background and a self-taught education. Most of his middle and upper-middle class comrades recognised his life experience and valued him for it. “The tale of Felicia Browne has got our boys’ blood up no end.”
“Has it?” Felicia Browne had been an early tragedy for the Britons in Spain, a nurse who had been shot running to aid a wounded Republican. Wintringham, who had barely registered her death at the time, wondered how accurate Ritter’s claim really was. He adopted an urgent, commanding tone. “Where is Masters?”
“Off plundering the vines,” Cornford said with an outraged, haughty tone. “Not always interested in the business of war, that one,” he said with a sneer. Masters was a tailor from Stepney who had shown a knack for ‘filching’, the true soldier’s skill of acquiring all manner of useful contraband.
There was a rattle of gunfire and Wintringham alone of the Britons ducked, to laughter from the rest. “Come come, Tom,” Cornford said languidly, “the enemy lines are eight hundred metres away.” He increasingly calculated in metric rather than the anglo-saxon imperial measurements.
“In the war they were fifty,” Wintringham snapped, “and however badly aimed, bullets are being aimed at us. My job is to kill and not be killed.” He peered through grimy spectacles at the ridiculously separated lines. “And could one of you tell me what that idiot is doing?” He pointed at the actually rather safe no-man’s land, where a Spanish volunteer was cheerfully navigating the broken ground carrying a crate of something on his shoulders. His patience now completely snapped. “Absolutely ridiculous!”
“It is, my British friend,” an interloper said cheerfully as he strolled towards the knot of Englishmen, his accent thickly German. “We try to fight for their country, we dig their trenches for them, while they go and get tomatoes,” there was little humour in the comment.
“Morgens, Renn,” Sinclair-Loutit said with a wave and a mug of tea. “You’ll join us?”
Ludwig Renn, or more properly Arnold Friedrich Vieth von Golssenau, was a Saxon writer and exile from his native Germany who, like Wintringham, had served in the Great War’s Western Front. He divided opinion among the Britons: Sinclair-Loutit, who liked everyone, admired his professionalism while to Cornford he was more Prussian than Saxon, stiff and humourless; he scowled as the German approached. The Britons and Renn’s group were united though, on the need to professionalise this motley Republican force. “You know that Treuba has not assig…” he struggled for the word, “assigned a reserve?”
Sinclair-Loutit, the doctor of their group, took a step back at the tactical talk. Ritter was outraged. “Why the hell not?”
“I know not. Every unit must has reserves, however big or small. Any officer with even the smallest knowledge of modern warfare knows that,” the German said indignantly.
Wintringham, whose anger had subsided as soon as it had flared, frowned. “Did you talk to Beimler?” Hans Beimler was a former Reichstag deputy who had a leading role in setting up the German volunteer force.
“I did, and he is as angry as I am.”
Wintringham nodded. “We need to shake this up,” he said looking over the Republican lines.
“Tonight,” Renn said in a conspiratorial tone. “von Ranke,” he said slowly, von Ranke being another German ex-military volunteer, “is leading an attack tonight. Will you come with us?”
Wintringham shook his head at a world in which raids were planned over gentlemen’s agreements and cups of tea. But it was all that they had and their only chance of moving the front. “I’m in, I’ll bring my dozen to the party.”
“And me,” Ritter said immediately. “The East End lads, and the Belgians, we’re itching for a tussle.”
Sinclair-Loutit smiled. “I’ll have the medical team ready.”
“What’s the objective?” Ritter was ‘fired up’.
“We think that a senior officer of my nation is over there,” Renn pointed at the far away Nationalist lines. “If we can capture him, it might prove to your countrymen that the non-intervention treaties are…”
“…fucking lies,” Ritter said, with enviable brevity. Cornford frowned. “Are you not up for this, John?”
Sinclair-Loutit spat out his tea. “John?”
Cornford grimaced. “I prefer Rupert,” he said firmly. “Rupert Brooke was a friend of the families,” he said in a way that invited no further discussion. Ritter, pleased to have punctured Cornford’s air of superiority, beamed. “I’m off, tonight,” he said enthusiastically, and then realised that this keenness could be mistaken for cowardice. “Sneaking back into France to get some new recruits.”
Ritter smiled thinly and with innocent eyes at what he had provoked, turned to Wintringham. “Bit of shut eye until?”
“Get the chaps down, certainly,” Wintringham said in an unintentionally ‘British Army Officer on the retreat from Mons’ sort of voice. “I’m going to see what passes for command today and then I’ll try and take a siesta,” he said the unfamiliar word with suspicion, “and brief them of our intent for a night raid.”
“What if they veto?”
“We’ll go anyway, yes Ludwig?”
“I think so. I need to check the reports, the…”
“…intelligence,” Sinclair-Loutit offered, despite earlier signalling his disengagement. “You want to check the accuracy of the information.”
“Yes,” Renn said with a passionate nod.
“Find out,” Wintringham said snappily, “we can’t plan the attack until we know where your German is.”
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Javier was his name, an educated man (Wintringham suspected a lawyer, or perhaps a civil servant) who had been forced to the rebel cause by a a strict Catholic father who had told him to do his duty or that the family’s support for the hoped for marriage to the lovely Ximena was a no-no. But having done his duty he had realised that soldiering wasn’t for him, and that living without Ximena was preferable to dying (also without her – he had no idea where she was as her intellectual family had run away). Wintringham knew all of this as Javier, when he realised that he wasn’t going to be eaten by Communist Russians, had been ceaselessly, scattily, chatty. And he confirmed that there was a German, seemingly (it was hard to tell from his quick, disjointed conversation, interlevened as it was by graphic descriptions of the attributes of young Ximena) some form of attache, training their troops and helping to coordinate their artillery and aircraft. It was the garbled account of this training, the focus upon good old fashioned (and, Wintringham thought wryly, terribly unmacho) staff skills, that convinced Wintringham. Unless Javier was a very effective plant, his story had ‘the ring of truth to it’.
Renn sat like a happy schoolmaster on results day, pleased that he could launch his raid. He looked around, keen for the Britons to endorse this plan. “We are satisfied, yes?” Cornford half raised his hands and made a conscious display of backing out of the conversation. Warmly dressed for his return to France, he didn’t feel it right to approve a plan and then sneak away. Sinclair-Loutit looked at the floor.
“I like it,” Ritter said his thin grin. “And we know where this German lad is going to be?”
There was a sudden rattle of translation between German, English and Spanish before a location in the rebel lines was identified. Renn had switched from benign to threatening. “Unless you’re lying to us, Javier, you wouldn’t do that, would you?” There was another flurry of anxious chatter as Javier swore on his life, that of Ximena, as well as a whole host of vaguely identifiable saints that he was, indeed, telling the truth.
“As you say Mr Ritter, worth a try, eh?” Renn was back to enthusiastic.
“I say we go in,” Ritter said, matching the German’s eagerness.
“I say it’s all rather slender,” Wintringham said with a donnish thoughtfulness, now giving voice to some residual fears. It was late afternoon, and if the raid was going ahead then orders would need to be attempted (they were always ‘given’ but not always ‘received’) while there was still sufficient light. He sensed that Renn and Ritter were keen to get on with it. “What else is with our notional German?” He paused for the inevitable burst of translated chatter.
“He says an ammunition supply,” Renn said after the translations.
“A distinct military objective,” Wintringham said firmly, Renn and Ritter relaxing visibly as they realised he was with them. “That should be our main objective, in case yon German is off seeing a friend, or is in the infirmary. He’s a bonus. Otherwise the men will be too busy searching every dead body or captive that they come across. Alright, let us to get to it.”
As the last rays of the sun sank into the distant hills Wintringham nodded at the men assembled. After a day of alerts and then 'standing to' they had settled on two groups. Wintringham and Ritter would lead one group of around forty in a headlong romp through an orchard (despite obscuring the fields of fire of both lines, neither side had been willing to clear it) after giving Renn and his two dozen Germans a head start in an oblique attack where the lines, in this part of the sector, were closest. Wintringham, leading an attack that he decried as ‘rather 1918’, wished he was going with them.
They crept forward, slowly. Some of the Spaniards, new to this war, had to be physically restrained by the Northern Europeans. While Wintringham had no desire to recreate July 1st 1916 (although he hadn’t been present, he shuddered at the eyewitness accounts of the British lines walking forward ‘as if on the parade ground at Aldershot’) he wanted his attack to arrive in a coherent form, rather than a straggling anemic force to be picked off one by one. It had become suddenly, heavily dark, and Wintringham, who had always imagined Spain to be a ceaselessly hot country, tightened his Gresham’s School scarf and found himself quickening his pace.
A rattle of small arms fire ahead and to the left signalled that Renn’s attack had reached the enemy lines. The distant rattle of rifle and pistol fire sounded precisely like the whirling rattles carried by young boys at sporting events. He realised that Renn hadn’t matched his caution but had, instead, rushed ahead; Wintringham’s attack was now dangerously tardy. He gestured to the nearest knot of Spaniards to quicken the pace; they complied with relish and, as far as he could see (which, in the middle of a darkened orchard, wasn’t far) the ragged line seemed to lurch forward.
Wintringham could just make out where Renn’s attack had crashed, like a wave striking a breakwater, onto and around a spur of the Nationalist lines, a poorly assembled collections of threadbare sandbags jutting out of their main position. He saw a young German, a firebrand socialist, directing the covering fire efficiently. But the Nationalists, stung out of their slumber by this evening’s unwelcome violence, were rallying. Wintringham was now creeping forward, practically stooping. But the Nationalists, so keen to deal with the threat to their exposed position, didn’t stop to look in front of them.
Wintringham paused, crouching low and briefly kneeling on a tired right leg. Next to him was an ex-Spanish Army non-commissioned type, greedily cupping one of their limited supply of grenades. He raised a speculative eyebrow. Wintringham silently shook his head. Under his breath he counted to twenty, to let his ragged group compose themselves after the march through the orchard.
“Now!” He cheered, rising awkwardly to his feet and firing wildly to his front. Next to him the Spaniard threw his grenade; it bounced over the sandbags and exploded noisily in the Nationalist trenches, although Wintringham couldn’t determine if it had claimed any victims. His group was running now, covering the few yards to the enemy lines. “Scream,” he shouted, wanting them to sound like the very hounds of Hell unleashed on a careless host. They complied, screeching wheezily as they clambered over the ramshackle lines.
Their lateness was now working in their favour; the Nationalists nearest Renn’s attack had been concentrating on the German attack and now faced the eruption of chaos behind them. Wintringham found himself overwhelmed by the bloodlust; he shot a fat Nationalist then saw another run toward him with a rusted rifle; he looked with terror at the Englishman as the weapon didn’t fire, and Wintringham felled him with a pistol shot to the head. All around him his group was losing cohesion as each man focussed upon his own private battle. It was now bitterly cold.
A man ran towards Wintringham, who sensing the approach spun on his heels, terrifying the approaching figure as stared down the barrel of Wintringham’s pistol. It was one of Renn’s Germans.
“You have him?” Wintringham asked this in a hiss.
“Nein, he wasn’t here.”
Wintringham found the adrenalin fading; he suddenly remembered that he was a man with responsibilities. “So we return to our lines?”
“Yes, we go back,” the German gestured to the spur where Renn’s men, their raid over, were messily pulling back.
Wintringham nodded and gestured to his own men, “time for home!” He shouted this tiredly. “Torres,” he said to the veteran, “covering fire,” he said, instinctively inching out of the trench. Torres nodded. As the Republican attack petered out, the Nationalists gave a desultory fire as Wintringham and Renn’s men slipped into the cover of night, and the trees. Just another skirmish in this war.
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GAME NOTES
I wanted to shift the focus for this update; amidst the Whitehall adventuring, I wanted to show a little of the wider world, focussing upon the oddities making up the ragtag collection of foreign adventurers fighting for the crisis-stricken Spanish Republic.
Most of the characters featured in the update are real; despite the mildly positive portrayal in this update (let’s call it, at least for now, giving him ‘the benefit of the doubt’) I remain deeply unconvinced by Wintringham. In a way he is as much a gentleman amateur as the Halifaxes and Baldwins of this timeline, he was one of those deeply driven (and flawed) Englishmen who find their moment. Perhaps renowed more for his citizen home defence concepts and training in the Second World War, here we find him leading an adhoc collection of Republicans in a night raid. The British and German characters were largely as portrayed, while Ritter and Masters are fictional they are based on real people. Cornford and Sinclair-Loutit were real, and the tale of the killing of the British nurse Felicia Browne did indeed rouse British volunteers to the Republican flag. If the British were a random bunch then the Germans fighting on the Republican side were truly unusual. Renn, Beimler and von Ranke were real, and fought bravely against a Nationalist force being openly supported by their countrymen. I included them as I wanted to show that the Germans were not unanimous in supporting the rebels.
The problem of both sides, but particularly the Republicans, in that war was still a rather amateur pursuit. The indifference to discipline and routine that, I hope permeates this chapter was real and there are hundreds of accounts of basic drill being wilfully ignored. Organisation of the Republicans was as chaotic as portrayed, with random groups being formed to achieve frankly limited objectives. The raid through the orchard is based on one line that I found in a history of the conflict; for the sake of showing the British volunteers I made it theirs.
